Transcript: Mayor Adams Celebrates Early Success Of ‘NYC Teenspace,’ Free Tele-Mental Health Service For NYC Teenagers

May 23, 2024

Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, Department of Mental Health and Hygiene: Good afternoon, everybody. Glad to be here. Glad to be here with you today to give you an update on NYC Teenspace, which, as we launched six months ago as the digital front door to our mental health system for New York City teens, available to every teen in New York City, free of charge, ages 13 to 17.

We're here today to report out on our first six months of data. As you'll see in our release, nearly 7,000 New Yorkers, 7,000 teenagers in our city have chosen to sign up. The majority of whom have experienced relief from getting on our platform. I'm going to stop talking, and you're going to hear directly from one of those teens today. I'm pleased to first introduce Ruby Tarquino.

Ruby Tarquinio: Thank you. Thank you. If it wasn't for having access to a therapist, I wouldn't have had the courage to come up on stage and deliver this speech. We may be strangers, but we share the same ups and downs that come with life. No one is immune to life's uncertainties. There is no such thing as a quick fix for life's troubles. Life is a journey. It's a marathon, and it's about progress rather than perfection.

Through New York City Teenspace, I've had the opportunity of learning about myself and growing as a person. Talking with a therapist isn't simply about finding a fix that doesn't exist. Talking to a therapist is about finding yourself and breaking the vicious mental cycle that continues to drag you down. Therapy allowed me to address the root of the problem and not put a Band-Aid over it. Therapy is about confronting yourself and giving yourself a hug. It's a journey with yourself to truly become someone that you can be proud to call yourself you.

Everyone deserves to see beauty in themselves the way that therapy allowed me to. Bad days are unavoidable. Bad reactions are understandable. Learning to take control of your reactions and shifting your perspective is not an easy feat. This is not a fight that has to be fought alone. Bottling up thoughts leads to depression, numbness, and anger. It feeds the cycle that keeps so many people up at night. It feeds the cycle that leads so many young people to feel distraught and act out negatively towards themselves.

There is validity and effort in a want to feel complete or to even feel at all. Therapy allows you to start to grab the reins of your brain. Tell it to listen to you. Speaking with a therapist continues to become more and more accessible for all people. Thank you so much for this opportunity, and I'll now be passing it over to Mayor Adams. Thank you.

Mayor Eric Adams: Amazing job, and I think nothing could personify why we did this in the first place. We had a series of town halls, youth town halls, throughout the city. The number one and number two issue during those town halls was mental health. Young people wanted to really find a safe space to deal with any time they have any mental health crisis that they wanted to face and how to get the support that they needed.

They did not want to use a rotary phone method in the smartphone age. We had to think differently. Dr. Vasan and Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom was open to thinking differently and taking that information that came out of those town halls. I remember one town hall together that Dr. Vasan and I were at, and when the young people were just talking about the stresses of life. I think your sentence of taking the rein of your brain, of being in control.

We all go through it. Trust me. We all go through those days when we are just feeling as though we're in a dark place. I went through that when my mom passed away. It took me a long time to come out of that state of just feeling hopeless without her being there that I could call on from time to time. Because you are a teen, people often try to be dismissive of what you're going through. I remember my son telling me when he broke up with his childhood girlfriend and somebody told him it was puppy love. He said, Well, darn it still hurts. It doesn't go away. That is what we felt.

When you look at the number of 6,800 young people signed up, 65 percent stated they felt better after speaking with a mental health professional. We are not attempting to ignore the problem. We want to meet it head on. We want you to use Teenspace. Give us some recommendations on how we can continue to evolve. I thank the young people who are behind us now. Because when you look at the numbers, something was significant for me, how many Black and brown young people were enrolling and participating. Because we are taught to be dismissive of what we are feeling. we were taught that it's a sign of weakness to acknowledge that I am going through something right now. When you have young people of color who are saying we are not going to live a lie, we're not going to ignore what we're feeling, and we're going to put in place how do we take reins of our brains. That's what this is about.

Kudos to all that gave us input. Kudos to Dr. Vasan and his team, Deputy Mayor, commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and DM Williams-Isom for always bringing these issues to the forefront, not ignoring the everyday problems. The chancellor always talks about how we want children to go in and just be academically smart. Before you can learn your ABCs, people need to understand that some folks are shattered in pieces. We've got to put you back and give you the help that you need so you can actually comprehend the information you're receiving every day. That's what we're doing from food to breathing to meditation to Teenspace. We want to develop the whole child and allow them to develop their full personhood. Kudos to this. Just begun, six months in, and we're moving in the right direction. Job well done. Thank you, everyone.

Commissioner Vasan: Thank you so much, mayor. It takes leadership in order to be able to embrace new ideas. Technology is not something that government always embraces openly, and it takes a leader to say, we're going to try this out because the cost of inaction is too high.

We know the data, right? We know that we're in a youth mental health crisis. We know that we are seeing rates of teenage suicidal thoughts, teenage suicide attempts, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, at rates that we haven't seen. We know that our smartphones and social media are contributing to this. They're not the only driver, but they're certainly amplifying it. We are saying we are going to try everything. Now, after six months, we're seeing some results. We're seeing success, and we're just getting started.

We approach these results with humility, right? We have 7,000 young people who have signed up. The majority are Black and brown. They're also Asian American Pacific Islander, right? I, as an AAPI leader, as an AAPI person, I would have loved to have a platform like this growing up because I definitely couldn't talk to my parents. I think we are, as an administration, also here during Mental Health Awareness Month, saying that we are going to try everything to respond to this once-in-a-generation crisis in mental health, right? We are going to intervene early. We're going to break down as many barriers as possible.

What's so encouraging about this data is that not only are the majority of young people who are on the platform experiencing some relief, but they're engaging in the ways that they want to engage. Many of them, about more than 40 percent, are doing video and text. The majority of them are using texting, which is native to young people. They just want to text sometimes. We are meeting people where they are with the front door to our mental health system that for too long has been too hard to find.

I'm very grateful to be a part of this project and grateful to my team at the Health Department and to our partners at Talkspace for helping us build this. We are just getting started because every interaction with a young person on this platform is teaching us something, teaching us how we can do better, what more we can do on outreach, how can we get parents more involved, how can we raise awareness, and how can we create a virtuous cycle where people on this platform are telling their friends and they're telling their friends so that this becomes available and used by all 400,000 teenagers in New York City.

Again, very grateful to be here. Thank you for the leadership from Mayor Adams to allowing us this space to try something new. Thanks to our partners in the Department of Education, New York City Public Schools, who will be a big part of this going forward and amplifying this to entire school systems. I'm going to turn it over to Chancellor Banks right now.

Chancellor David Banks, New York City Public Schools: Thank you, Dr. Vasan. Good day to everybody. I'll be very brief. Ruby, thank you so much. I had a chance to chat with her when I got into the building. You are a bright, shining light, and we appreciate you. It's not easy to come up and stand in front of these cameras, and the whole city is watching everything that you just said. It takes courage, and you got up. Because you're speaking not just for yourself, you're speaking for so many young people who, as the mayor said, are going through some things.

For a lot of us, it's a natural way of growing up. It's called life, and life throws all kinds of stressful situations at us. We can deal with them, but sometimes we need a little extra help. That's why I'm so appreciative of this program. When Dr. Vasan first told us about it, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. When you hear from the folks at Talkspace who are the ones who created this, and I'm just thrilled to be in partnership.

The mayor's right. The mayor and I have moved over since we got in office, have moved all around the city, and we talk to young people on a regular basis, and over and over and over again… It's actually a little surprising to me to hear that, right, mayor? Right at the top of the list, mental health. Sometimes not just for themselves, for their friends. Because they care deeply about their friends, and they know that their friends are going through things, and they're saying, we need more programs, we need more supports for folks, for kids who are going through stuff.

This is just the start. I'm so glad that we're back here today to announce just some of the initial findings. 6,800 signed up, and 65 percent are already saying it's been a really good thing. We're going to continue to build on those numbers, big time. We're going to make sure that this gets out and everybody is aware of it. Those who signed up early on are like the trailblazers for a brand new experience, and we've got to make sure that everybody knows about it. Ruby, I want to thank you also for your mom. Your mom is just wonderful, who I also had a chance to meet. I thank her as well. She's with you every step of the way, loving and guiding you and everything else.

Everybody doesn't have that also. The mayor was very fortunate. The mayor had a mother who just loved him deeply. We have a lot of young people who have a mom or dad who may also love them deeply, but have their own troubles. They need their own Teenspace and access, easier, quicker access to get to the help that they need. Just being able to pick up your phone and access the technology, this is how you use technology in a positive way. It can really work for all of us. You're the embodiment.

I'm sure so many of these young people are here with us today, right? You all are students from the school, I'd imagine, right? From one of the schools here. I want to thank all the principals who came out today. Thank you for your leadership each and every day, all the principals here on this campus.

For all of the young people who are going through some stuff, help is here. We're going to continue to build it. We're going to continue to expand on it. I thank the mayor because the mayor, from the time he got here, he has been so fully, totally committed to wellness, physical wellness, taking care of yourself, exercising, eating the right things, taking time to rest your body, your mind. Then we need additional help and support. That's what Teenspace represents. I thank the mayor for that. I thank Dr. Vasan. I thank our deputy mayor, Anne Williams-Isom, who is just an angel in our midst. Thank you, everybody.

Commissioner Vasan: This represents the best of what a public-private partnership looks like. Admittedly, discerning, choosing a private partner, a private sector partner can be hard, especially in this field of digital health. There are a lot of digital health providers, digital mental health providers. It's sometimes hard to make heads and tails of whose platform is best, which has the best data. Sometimes it's peer-reviewed data. Sometimes it's not.

One thing was clear from the moment I met Jon Cohen and the team at Talkspace was not only did they have a good product, but they care about New York City. They're based in New York City. They were invested in New York City and wanted this to be a success. I am so glad to say that this partnership has been so productive from the beginning. Listening to us, listening to our concerns as a city, really understanding how to align the public's interests with a private platform has been really an object lesson in how we can partner and learn from the private sector who's doing so much in innovation. I'm pleased to introduce Dr. Jon Cohen from Talkspace.

Dr. Jon R. Cohen, CEO, Talkspace: Thank you. To go off script for one second, when I walked into school this morning and looked around, it brought back an unbelievable amount of memories for me because I'm actually a product of the New York City school system.

Thank you, Mayor Adams and Commissioner Vasan, for your groundbreaking vision and implementation of the New York City Teenspace Program, making mental health support available and accessible to 465,000 teenagers throughout the city. Thank you, Chancellor Banks, for fully embracing the program and assisting in the rollout of the schools. In fact, the largest number of sign-ups was the day after you sent a letter to every parent describing the program. Thank you for that.

To date, we have had over 500,000 visits to the Teenspace website. We've had 87 million ad impressions, 170 press articles, 15 street teams out in the communities, 56 school events, and five webinars for parents and staff with literally hundreds of people attending. We have been very encouraged by the early results of the first six months.

As a reminder, Talkspace is a secure, HIPAA-compliant platform that matches teens with a dedicated New York State-licensed therapist. Matching occurs within hours, and the teen can begin messaging their therapist immediately to address their issue 24/7, as many times a day as they want, accommodating their schedules. It is no surprise that teens love texting for therapy, and as you've heard, 96 percent are utilizing messaging, with 60 percent of messaging occurring during after-school hours.

The top five reasons for seeking assistance are: feeling depressed, as most common, followed by improving my relationships, then becoming my best self, coping with anxiety, and difficulties at home and school. 80 percent of users are identified as BIPOC, and 62 percent reside in neighborhoods with high health and economic disparities. Essentially, we are meeting teens where they are, on their phones. The teens who have used Talkspace, you've heard, are telling us that they are feeling better, and the very early data suggests 65 percent clinical improvement.

I want to comment on our high-risk incidents. We've identified almost 50 teens with moderate to high risk for suicide and helped navigate 36 high-risk events, including seven episodes of attempted suicide, eight teens reporting child abuse or exploitation, one teen reported being assaulted, one drug overdose, seven teens requiring a high level of care, including hospitalization, and three reporting self-harm. The therapists successfully coordinated directly with other New York City resources to help provide additional care for all of these individuals. It is a credit to the other New York City services that these teens are getting the appropriate care they require.

Mr. Mayor, you should be proud that in addition to the almost 7,000 teens that have engaged to date, the program assisted these 86 teens in high-risk situations in getting the care they needed that may have significantly altered their life trajectory. I want to reiterate that these are encouraging, yet early results as we move forward to engage as many more teens as possible in this initiative to help mitigate the ongoing mental health crisis in our youth. Thank you.

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